Monday, February 24, 2014

Post #118: Colon fear

ooooooh, symbolism
Oops, there goes another month between posts. To be fair, I've had two colds in the last two months, but an excess of mucus does not impede my ability to write. That would be laziness (or forgetfulness, or both).

Tonight I am thinking a lot about fear; more specifically, colon fear. I've dealt with my fair share of anxiety; I know how the body feels when it panics. I know what rational thoughts to tell myself to calm down; I understand that just because something feels scary, it is not necessarily so. Repeated exposure to anxiety producing situations have allowed me to (somewhat) separate the feelings from the reality. It took me years of, for lack of a better word, desensitization to be able to attain this perspective. I've had an anxious brain my whole life; I've had an anxious colon my whole life; but I've only had an ANGRY colon for a few years. I used to think that fear was fear was fear, but lately I'm realizing that colon fear is different. I'm not desensitized to it yet. You would think that after a year or two's worth of daily cramps and pains and other symptoms I would stop mentally packing my hospital bag every time I spend an agonizing hour on the toilet; but (confession time!) I still sleep with a phone next to my bed and a sports bra and sweatshirt by the nightstand, should I need to get dressed in a hurry in the middle of the night. Colon fear is still very real for me.

Now that I've pretty much concluded that my new "normal" isn't very normal at all, I've been putting out feelers into the real world, trying to figure out what I want to do next and how I can balance the unpredictability of my colon with the needs and demands of the rest of the world (friends, employers, etc.). I've been thinking about what I want to do, and what I can do, and I've come to realize that my colon fear has been clouding and confusing my conclusions.

I heard from an old friend today, who has been as understanding as possible about my AAC and the limitations it places on my life. Hearing her voice on my voice mail made me smile and think of the hijinks that would ensue if we lived in the same city. But we don't. I rarely see her, and that sucks. There's a reunion coming up, and a lot of my friends will be there, and part of me would love to go, but then colon fear rears its ugly head and my mind is inundated with the unknowns of travel, the lack of control over food and bathrooms and transportation, the sick people on the airplane, being away from my doctor and a hospital system I'm familiar with.....the list goes on and on. In any given week I have a bad day or two. How does that look when I'm thousands of miles from home?

The reality is that people with Crohn's don't cloister themselves into hermetically sealed living pods (I wish) away from all of the unknowns of the world, from flu-stricken seatmates to closed bathrooms to problem foods (what if all they served at reunion was lettuce!? ahhhhh). I've been trying to stay in the proverbial pod, and it feels safe, but really it's a prison of my own creation (see illustration above). Part of me wants to break free-to live life with reckless, germ infested abandon-but the colon fear wraps itself around my brain, whispering consoling thoughts about missing life's events and doling out a never ending supply of hand sanitizer.

Someday, my hope is that colon fear will just become like any other fear, something to be considered and put in its place. For now, though, it seems too large to conquer. The catastrophes it promises still seem possible to me. Pre-diagnosis, I was always feeling like I was waiting for the next bad thing to happen, for the next shoe to drop. At this point, I've been hit in the head by any number of falling footwear, and I can't shake the fear that they will keep falling and falling and falling.

And it's that thought, that fear, that specific colon fear that will keep me grounded and away from some of my very favorite people in the world. When it's all typed out, plain on the page, it really does seem like a lot to give up.

1 comment:

  1. Hi there, I'm Lindsey! I have a question regarding your blog. Could you please email me when you have a moment? Thank you so much, looking forward to hearing from you!

    lindseyDOTcaldwellATrecallcenterDOTcom

    ReplyDelete